FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 15 Francis Schaeffer discusses quotes of Andy Warhol from “The Observer June 12, 1966” Part A (Feature on artist Robert Indiana plus many pictures of Warhol with famous friends and also interview with performance artist John Giorno)

Recently I got to see this piece of art by Andy Warhol of Dolly Parton at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas:

J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of a cautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”

Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.”

Many modern artists are left in this point of desperation that Schaeffer points out and it reminds me of the despair that Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes. Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.” THIS IS EXACT POINT SCHAEFFER SAYS SECULAR ARTISTS ARE PAINTING FROM TODAY BECAUSE THEY BELIEVED ARE A RESULT OF MINDLESS CHANCE.

Here is what Francis Schaeffer wrote about Andy Warhol’s art and interviews:

The pop artist man is Andy Warhol. The Observer June 12, 1966 does a big spread on Warhol. He deserves I must say a big spread. He is a very important man today in expressing this whole situation of the absurd. He is the man who paints all the Campbell Soup cans, but there is something very interesting about painting the Campbell Soup cans that I found out, and that is that he doesn’t paint them, but they have what they call the factory.

His assistants make them from a silk screen and they sell them for $8000.00 a piece.

He has been making films. His film “Sleep” consists solely of a man sleeping and lasts 6 hours. (Audience laughs.) Do you laugh or cry? I have a hunch that it is a different kind of a sick joke. For 6 hours the camera grinds on him and he tosses in his sleep. Warhol himself says, “I haven’t thought about my films. They just keep me busy.”

I think now you are in the game of absurdity. The people who are really in this understand that the reason they go through the motions of a game is because that is all there is. What you do is fill up time. You could do the opposite thing, it really doesn’t matter. (That is why Warhol does not direct in his films.) None of that matters.

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Picture from the movie SLEEP:

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John Giorno

Left: John Giorno being shot by William Burroughs on August 31, 1965
Right: John Giorno in 2007 while in London for the showing of Sleep with Erik Satie’s Vexations

John Giorno was the star of Sleep and an early boyfriend of Andy Warhol prior to the Factory – when Warhol was using an old fire station as his studio. Giorno continues to do performances internationally and to write poetry.

Our interviews with Warhol’s friends and collaborators continue with John Giorno, 65, poet, Aids activist, friend and confidant of Warhol and subject of his film, Sleep. Interviews by Catherine Morrison.

The first time I met Andy was at his first solo New York Pop show in Eleanor Ward’s Stable gallery in the fall of 1962, but it was at a friend’s dinner party around that time that we really got to know each other. For the next two years we were very close; we saw each other every day, or every other day.

I was a kid in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker. I was living this life where I would see Andy every night, get drunk and go into work with a hangover every morning. The stock market opened at 10 and closed at three. By quarter to three I would be waiting at the door, dying to get home so I could have a nap before I met Andy. I slept all the time – when he called to ask what I was doing he would say, “Let me guess, sleeping?”

We used to go to Jonas Mekas’s Film-makers’ Cooperative in 1962 to watch these underground films. Andy saw them and said, “Why doesn’t somebody make a beautiful film?” So he did.

On Memorial Day weekend in 1963 we went away for a few days and I woke up in the night to find him staring at me – he took a lot of speed in those days. That’s where the idea for the movie came from – he was looking for a visual image and it just happened to be me. He said to me on the way home: “Would you like to be a movie star?” “Of course,” I said, “I want to be just like Marilyn Monroe.”

He didn’t really know what he was doing; it was his first movie. We made it with a 16mm Bolex in my apartment but had to reshoot it a month later. The film jumped every 20 seconds as Andy rewound it. The second shoot was more successful but he didn’t know what to do with it for almost a year.

The news that Warhol had made a movie triggered massive amounts of publicity. It was absurd – he was on the cover of Film Culture and Harper’s Bazaar before the movie was finished! In the end, 99% of the footage didn’t get used; he just looped together a few shots and it came out six hours long.

You either really loved it or you hated it; I thought it was brilliant and daring. But then I loved so much of Andy’s work. I remember walking into the first Factory in 63 and seeing the silkscreen silver Elvises for the first time. They were like these jewels, radiating life and joy, and they were just lying on a dirty floor in an old firehouse! It was so exhilarating.

He transformed my life. He wasn’t afraid of anything – if he had an idea, he acted on it. If it turned out lousy, so what? If it turned out well, then that was great.

I didn’t see him much after 1964 although in the last year of his life, I saw him a lot, about a dozen times in seven months. I’m so glad now that I did see him and talk to him before he died.

Andy Warhol said, “What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted. And then when you saw it and you saw the sheer simplicity of it, you learned what it was all about. Those movies showed you how some people act and react with other people. They were like actual sociological ‘For instance’s. They were like documentaries, and if you thought it could apply to you, it was an example, and if it didn’t apply to you, at least it was a documentary…” –

More than one seemingly religious person’s secret sins have been exposed at their death; Warhol’s secrets were that he went to church and served at a soup kitchen.

by James Romaine

The works of our century are the mirrors of our predicament produced by some of the most sensitive minds of our time. In the light of our predicament we must look at the works of contemporary art, and conversely, in the light of contemporary art we must look at our predicament. Paul Tillich in“Each Period Has Its Peculiar Image of Man”

In his final self-portrait, Andy Warhol’s gaze is both perplexed and perplexing. Like the artist, everything about this work is suspended in a haze of mystery. Warhol probably had no expectation that this would be his final self-reflection, yet it’s hard to imagine him treating himself differently even if he had known.

Warhol treated everything the same. Cool detachment was as much a trademark for Warhol as Campbell’s was for soup. Warhol’s coolness has often been read as cynicism, and it did involve a degree of distance, but only out of a perceived need for self-protection. The seeming contradiction of Warhol’s Self-portrait, and indeed all of his work, is that he expresses himself without revealing anything about himself; he is at once alienated and self-alienating.

There is scarcely a person in America whose life has not been affected—whether or not they know it—by the way Warhol transformed our understanding of our culture. Certainly there is no serious artist working today who has not been influenced by Warhol’s conversion of the banal world of consumer culture into the sacred realm of art. We see ourselves and our world reflected in the mirror of Warhol’s art, but the image has still not come into full focus. By the time he painted this last Self-portrait, Warhol had become the most famous artist in the world; but more than a decade later his art remains enigmatic.

Warhol began his career in New York as an illustrator of women’s footwear, under his real name, Andrew Warhola. The darling of magazine editors, Warhol acquired the nickname “Candy Andy.” Perceptions of Warhol today have not changed much since then.

We may think of sex and drugs (two things Warhol mostly abstained from) or fame and fortune (two things Warhol abounded in) as Andy’s candies. Yet Warhol’s persona, with his fast parties and white wigs, differed greatly from the private identity he both concealed and revealed in his art. Sly as a fox, Warhol played dumb with comments meant to set us off track, such as, “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surfaces of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

There is, in fact, a great deal concealed beneath the surface of Warhol’s art. The surfaces of his works appear to be mechanical — an appearance Warhol emphasized by calling his studio “the Factory” and claiming to make art that could be done by anyone. The smooth veneer of silk-screening not only created a mechanical appearance, but his practice of reproducing already-reproduced images published in magazines and newspapers allowed Warhol to increase the degrees of separation between himself and his subjects.

Nevertheless, Warhol continued to use imagery that had personal significance to him. Many of these images were spiritual ones, influenced by the Catholicism that permeates Warhol’s art. Despite reports that he went to church almost daily, some doubt the credibility of Warhol’s faith and even consider his work anti-Christian. Warhol’s life was, admittedly, filled with contradictions. He was always trying to protect his true intentions, especially regarding his Catholicism. Many of Warhol’s friends did not know of his religious life until after his death.

More than one seemingly religious person’s secret sins have been exposed at their death; Warhol’s secrets were that he went to church and served at a soup kitchen. In his eulogy for Warhol, John Richardson outed him from the confessional when he said:

I’d like to recall a side of his character that he hid from all but his closest friends; his spiritual side. Those of you who knew him in circumstances that were the antithesis of spiritual may be surprised that such a side existed. But exist it did, and it’s key to the artist’s psyche. Although Andy was perceived—with some justice—as a passive observer who never imposed his beliefs on other people, he could on occasion be an effective proselytizer. To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew’s studies for the priesthood. And he regularly helped out at a shelter serving meals to the homeless and hungry. Trust Andy to have kept these activities in the dark. The knowledge of this secret piety inevitably changes our perception of an artist who fooled the world into believing that his only obsessions were money, fame, glamour, and that he could be cool to the point of callousness. Never take Andy at face value….

With family roots in Byzantine-Slavic Catholicism, Warhol kept a homemade altar with a crucifix and well-worn prayer book beside his bed. He frequently visited Saint Vincent Ferrer’s Church on Lexington Avenue. The pastor of Saint Vincent’s confirmed that Warhol visited the church almost daily. He would come in mid-afternoon, light a candle, and pray for fifteen minutes, sometimes making use of the intimacy of the private chapels. The pastor described Warhol as intensely shy and private, especially regarding his religion. Warhol’s brother has characterized him as “really religious, but he didn’t want people to know about that because [it was] private.” For someone so bent on self-protection, Warhol’s efforts to keep his religious life a secret may indicate just how important his faith was to him.

Do these religious revelations offer insight into Warhol’s art? They do; perhaps more than has yet been appreciated by either the art or Christian worlds. Warhol’s consumer imagery at first seems obsessed with the external world of contemporary culture to the exclusion of the internal life of faith. But there is also a persistent longing for something more, a hunger that is evident in the last Self-portrait and, most famously, in those cans of Campbell’s soup.

In order to see this religious dimension, we must regain our sense of the sacramental—the use of material things as vehicles for encountering the divine and enabling eternity to break into time and space. Warhol’s pop art, often criticized as mere regurgitation of advertising, actually displaces images from their original context in the commercial world, transporting them to the realm of art, collapsing the distance between the two, and creating new associations and meanings.

The Campbell’s soup can, one of Warhol’s most famous motifs, thus becomes another self-portrait of the artist. The can, like Warhol’s public persona, is cool, metallic, machine-made, impenetrable, a mirror of its surroundings. These qualities, superficial though they are, nevertheless seduce the eye.

But what completes this self-portrait are the can’s contents; they should be the most significant part, but actually have very little in common with the can’s exterior. Soup, a warm source of nourishment, is a sensitive element that will not survive long outside of a protective container. Hidden beneath supermarket imagery, Warhol’s faith is sealed for protection.

While carefully keeping himself secure inside, Warhol succeeded in making everyone believe that the soup can should be the focus of attention. Some have become enraptured by their own reflection on its metallic surface. Others have complained that Warhol and his art are hollow. Very few have attempted to open the can and find out what’s inside.

Warhol’s creative gift was an ability to bring subjects into spiritual equilibrium. He treated ultra-glamorous movie stars and anonymous police arrest photos with the same combination of contempt and envy. Warhol used consumer items more than just as mirrors of his time.

What seems to have attracted him to Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans, as in 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, was a sense of comfort, belonging and equality.

Warhol admitted that one reason he was attracted to the imagery of Campbell’s soup was that he had eaten Campbell’s soup nearly every day as a boy. Soup, of course, is a nearly global icon of home, but Campbell’s is a distinctly American icon.

For Warhol, growing up in a poor immigrant family struggling to find its place in a new homeland, Campbell’s soup probably offered a reassuring sense of belonging.

Warhol loved mass consumer imagery because of its equilibrating powers. “Coke is Coke,” he once said, “and no matter how rich you are you can’t get a better one than the one the homeless woman on the corner is drinking.”

Living in New York City, Warhol undoubtedly experienced the way cities have of exaggerating the distance between wealth and poverty even while juxtaposing them. Perhaps reinforced by the piety and poverty of his childhood, Warhol may have looked forward to the equality of heaven, with the mechanical nature of his work forecasting an eternal destiny.

Warhol’s strategy of representing heaven by repeated images has been linked to Byzantine icons, which limit individual creativity in favor of a standardized form. Warhol’s work has a certain hypnotic rhythm, not unlike the rosary. This repetition also suggests that the image could extend infinitely, giving us a glimpse into eternity through everyday reality.

200 Campbell’s Soup Cans celebrates more than social egalitarianism. But in a critique of America’s emergent consumer religion, 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans also joins a long artistic tradition of vanitas images, in which lavish displays of wealth are offset by reminders of life’s fleeting nature and the inevitable final judgment.

Warhol’s references to religious themes increased throughout his career, culminating in his most overtly religious and plainly sacramental works, patterned after Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Warhol made more than one hundred works based on Leonardo’s image, but until recently these works received very little attention.

Many things may have drawn Warhol to the Last Supper, including the fact that Warhol’s own art often dealt with food as a symbol of heaven.

Warhol’s Catholicism asserted the miracle of transubstantiation, in which food—bread and wine—becomes a heavenly substance. Warhol may have accessed Leonardo’s imagery to set himself within a certain tradition of religious art.

Leonardo brought out the classical and realist artist in Warhol, even though the meaning of “classical” and “real” had radically changed in the five hundred years separating them. Leonardo’s breakthroughs in artistic perspective had radically brought the Christ figure into the viewer’s world; Warhol brought Leonardo down off the wall, and in so doing brought Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist into his world.

Indeed, Warhol’s interest in Campbell’s soup and the Last Supper are linked. Remember, Warhol said that his attraction to Campbell’s soup was that he had eaten it every day as a child. Warhol’s brother recalled that a reproduction of the Last Supper hung on their family’s kitchen wall. As Warhol sat eating his soup, he ate under the watchful presence of Christ.

Another reason Warhol turned to the Last Supper was that it reminded him of his mother, Julia Warhola. Mrs. Warhola had a prayer card with an image of the Last Supper that she kept in her Bible. After her death, Warhol kept this card as a reminder of his mother’s faith. He was very close to his mother, who came to live with him in New York. Warhol’s brother noted that Andy and their mother had a small altar in their New York apartment and that “Andy wouldn’t leave unless [she] would come into the kitchen and kneel down with him and pray.”

Mrs. Warhola’s prayer card bears a remarkable resemblance to Warhol’s art, for it has reworked its subject significantly: the figure of Matthew is shifted, and Christ is given a golden halo — changes probably made to invigorate the viewer’s devotion. Is it too unlikely to suppose that Warhol’s art had the same intent?

Works like Last Supper (Dove) bring together brand name products from the supermarket and the sacramental imagery of the church, asserting that modern life and faith are neither separate nor contradictory. Each makes the other more real and meaningful. The dove, descending from above Christ like a halo, represents the Holy Spirit; the General Electric sign (with its own halo) is a symbol of the Son. It doesn’t take much imagination to connect GE with the light of the world, but there is an even subtler meaning to this sign: GE’s slogan, “We bring good things to life,” points to the resurrection and eternal life.

Warhol died of unexpected complications from routine surgery on February 22, 1987, making the Last Supper images a fitting, if unintentional, conclusion for Warhol’s art. They show Christ in a creative and transformative action. Artistic transubstantiation allowed Warhol to identify with Christ, to see Christ as an artist and to see art as a sanctifying activity.

Indeed, Warhol’s approach to art and Christianity exemplify what H. Richard Niebuhr, in Christ and Culture, famously called “Christ the Transformer of Culture.” Just as Christ transformed common bread and wine into the holy sacraments, Warhol transformed everyday imagery into art.

The popularity of Warhol’s work is a reflection of our own hunger for such transformation. Like all art, it raises questions: Are we hungry enough to accept anything offered to us? How are we to be discerning? Was Warhol discerning? If we are to “test each spirit,” should we filter out Warhol? Was Warhol so hungry for something divine that he too easily accepted substitutes for the one thing that would satisfy him?

If we consider the disreputable company Warhol kept, our answer to the last question might be yes. Maybe Campbell’s soup was no more than a commercial substitute for a spiritual hunger. But the spiritual sincerity and artistic complexities of his last works suggest that Andy Warhol’s faith and art cannot be so easily dismissed.

November 12, 2003

James Romaine is an art historian who lives in New York, and the author of “Objects of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith.”This article originally appeared in Regeneration Quarterly. Copyright 2003, James Romaine.All rights reserved.

Today I started off by posting some comments that Andy Warhol made about his films and Schaeffer noted that there was no directing of these films because it doesn’t matter in the end anyway because it is all left to time and chance. One of those films is called EAT and it stars Robert Indiana eating for a hour and a cat gets on his shoulder at one point and he pets the cat. Robert is the artist that I am featuring today and at the end of this post I am taking him to task for his view that we can have hope in a materialistic world without God in the picture.

Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol at the opening of Americans 1963

Published on Jan 25, 2013

Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol at the Opening of Americans 1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Kennedy was at the beginning of his notable career as a freelance photojournalist in New York in 1963 when he met the two rising stars of Pop art, the 34-year-old Robert Indiana and the 33-year-old Andy Warhol. This photograph was taken at the opening of the exhibition Americans 1963, which featured several works by Indiana and fourteen other contemporary artists, though none by Warhol. The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, to which Indiana had sold a painting two years earlier. Shortly thereafter Indiana would go on to design a Christmas card for that museum, which marked the debut of what would become the painter’s iconic image, LOVE.

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Robert Indiana: A Map of Indiana

Uploaded on Sep 14, 2011

Robert Indiana, elusive Pop-Art legend, offers a private view into the events, people and places that have shaped his art. Filmed on location at Indiana’s island home, the film, narrated by Indiana in an exclusive interview, details the pictorial memoir he has assembled about his long life, from his origins in the state he made his namesake to his role in the creation of the Pop- Art movement in downtown New York through his involvement in the Museum of Modern Art, his eventual disillusionment with the New York art scene, and the great resurgence of interest in his work both in Europe and the United States, as he takes stock of his life and legacy.

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Inside New York’s Art World: Robert Indiana, 1978

Uploaded on Dec 15, 2008

Interviewer: Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive in the Duke University Libraries: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollec…
Diamonstein-Spielvogel interviews Indiana about his life and works

Robert Indiana, who was born Robert Clark in 1928, first emerged on the wave of Pop Art that engulfed the art world in the early 1960s. Bold and visually dazzling, his work embraced the vocabulary of highway signs and roadside entertainments that were commonplace in post war America. Presciently, he used words to explore themes of American identity, racial injustice, and the illusion and disillusion of love. The appearance in 1966 of what became his signature image, ‘LOVE’, and its subsequent proliferation on unauthorized products, eclipsed the public’s understanding of the emotional poignancy and symbolic complexity of his art. This retrospective will reveal an artist whose work, far from being unabashedly optimistic and affirmative, addresses the most fundamental issues facing humanity—love, death, sin, and forgiveness—giving new meaning to our understanding of the ambiguities of the American Dream and the plight of the individual in a pluralistic society.

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Robert Indiana Full Circle

Published on Sep 22, 2013

An 8-minute preview of American INSIGHT’s half-hour documentary-in-progress celebrates the artistic ingenuity of American Pop artist Robert Indiana, who considers Philadelphia his spiritual home. Creator of one of the world’s most famous statues, Indiana remains virtually anonymous to younger generations, yet highly prolific. Since 1969, he has lived and worked on an island 15 miles off the coast of Maine.

Inventing, but never patenting, the iconic LOVE statue, Indiana continues to use words and typographic forms to define his distinctive approach to both language and art. Exploring the boundaries of shape, line, color theory, and meaning within letters and signs, he challenges our traditional conventions of language and art. From large sculpture installations to hard-edged paintings, Indiana incorporates the lyrical nature of poetry while expanding the boundaries of our visual thinking.

American INSIGHT has captured hours of rare footage containing both intimate conversations with him and several public appearances during the past decade: the only such footage taken of this intensely private man during that time.

American INSIGHT

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Schierholt’s Conversations with Robert Indiana – an excerpt

Uploaded on Jun 29, 2011

An excerpt from the Dale Schierholt film – A Visit to the Star of Hope: Conversations with Robert Indiana

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Conversations with Robert Indiana, Trailer

Uploaded on Jan 14, 2011

Trailer from the film by Dale Schierholt, Conversations with Robert Indiana

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Andy Warhol – Eat (1963)

Uploaded on Jun 9, 2010

This is Andy Warhol’s movie, “Eat”
This movie was made in 1964. This is, the entire movie.

Eat is filmed in black-and-white, has no soundtrack, and depicts fellow pop artistRobert Indiana engaged in the process of eating for the entire length of the film. The comestible being consumed is apparently a mushroom. Finally, notice is also taken of a brief appearance made by a cat.

References

External links

andy warhol – sleep (1963)

Andy Warhol: BBC Radio 4 Interview (March 17th 1981)

Uploaded on Apr 16, 2011

Andy Warhol talks to Edward Lucie Smith about portrait painting, his choice of subject, his work process, wanting to paint as many pictures as he can, his love of his Sony Walkman, his favourite subject, his dislike of feelings and emotions, his sense of time and ageing and his affection for everyone.

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Andy Warhol interview 1966

Published on Feb 13, 2013

Extended interview with Andy Warhol (1966)

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Andy Warhol och hans Factory – Clip 01-12

Uploaded on Dec 26, 2010

Factory People, episode 1, clip 1 out of 4. The Swedish title is Andy Warhol och hans Factory, and it is in English with Swedish subtitles.

This was recorded from free DVB-T television using an Elgato EveTV Hybrid receiver. I used the rudimentary editor within the EyeTV software and exported the clips in H.264/MPEG-4 format, usually four snippets per episode.

if this violates any copyright law, then I am sorry. Just remove the clip, block it or ask me to remove the clip and I will promptly take it down. I am just a fan, not in the business of making any money or anything else from this.

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Robert Indiana “Hope & the New Year

Uploaded on Jan 13, 2010

Artist Robert Indiana “Hope & The New Year” Rosenbaum Contemporary

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Robert Indiana’s new message in 2010 was the word “Hope,” but how can that be attained without bringing God back into the picture?What hope does man have if we are just a product of chance? The people who are promoting this idea in the framework of a materialist worldview are taking a leap into the area of nonreason.

Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason

Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984), philosopher, theologian
and the founder of L‟Abri Fellowship, believed he had the
answers to the dilemma of modern man. In Escape fromReason, Schaeffer traces the development of his despairof finding any meaning and purpose in life, culminating inthe irrational “leap of faith” promoted by religious andsecular existentialists in an effort to escape the intolerablefutility of an empty, deterministic universe.

When we began to see the intellect as autonomous, and „nature‟ set free
from „grace‟, Schaeffer argues, nature “ate up grace”, removing the
„upper story‟ (God the creator, heaven and heavenly things, the unseen
and its influence on earth, man‟s soul, unity) from the rational sphere.
Thinking independently of God‟s revelation, rationalistic man was unable
to find any „universals‟ (grace) which would give meaning and unity to
all the „particulars‟ (nature). Once the particulars were set free, it proved
impossible to hold them together. The results of man‟s failure came to a
head in what Schaeffer called “the line of despair”; a point in history in
which the philosophers abandoned their age-old hope of finding a
unified answer for knowledge and life. The relativism that followed has
shaped our thinking, our culture, and our theology….

Following Hegel, Kierkegaard (1813-55) is Schaeffer‟s symbol of “the
real modern man” who has finally abandoned the hope of a unified field
of knowledge. The original problem, which had been formulated in
terms of „nature‟ and „grace‟, and then „freedom‟ and „nature‟, has at last
(under Kierkegaard) degenerated into a dichotomy between „faith‟ and
„rationality‟, separated by a vast chasm that no amount of rational
thinking can bridge. Meaning and truth are now disconnected from
reason and knowledge; if we are to attain them, we have no alternative
but to make an irrational “leap of faith”.

The new philosophy – or anti-philosophy – wasn‟t kept bottled up in an
ivory tower. Hegellian relativism and Kierkegaardian irrationalism filtered down to the masses in three different ways; it spread geographically from Germany outward, penetrating Holland and Switzerland, then reaching England, taking some time to arrive in America; it spread through the classes, beginning with the intellectuals and then, through the mass-media, infiltrating the workers ranks (but failing to penetrate the middle-classes); it spread through the disciplines, beginning with philosophy (Hegel), then art (the post-impressionists), then music (Debussy), then general culture (early T.S. Eliot), and finally theology (Karl Barth). The hope of finding a unified field of knowledge is gone.
Modern man now lives in despair – “the despair of no longer thinking
that what has always been the aspiration of men and women is at all
possible”.

But all this proves too much for man; “he cannot live merely as a
machine”, and this new way of thinking slices him into a cruel

dichotomy, where any meaning, values and hope can only be obtained
irrationally. “What makes modern man modern”, Schaeffer observes, “is
the existence of this dichotomy and not the multitude of things he
places, as a leap, in the upper story.” Since no one can live consistently
within this system, they must steal things from elsewhere, in order to
live their lives, often plucking them (out of context) from a Christian
worldview.

This escape from reason was objectified in the secular and religious
existentialism that followed. On the secular side, Jean-Paul-Sartre(1905-80) talked about „authenticating‟ yourself by an act of the will.
What you actually do, however, is neither here nor there – so long as
you do something! Jaspers (1883-1969), on the other hand, pointed to a
„final experience‟ that somehow imparts a certainty that you are really
there and gives some hope of meaning. But being an irrational
experience, it cannot be shared, and is difficult to retain. Heidegger
(1889-1976) spoke of angst – a vague feeling of dread – as something
upon which to hang everything. And on the religious wing, Karl Barth
(on Schaeffer‟s interpretation) held that, whilst the Bible contains
mistakes (the so-called „higher criticism‟), there was actually no rational
interchange between the upper and lower spheres and we should
believe it anyway, expecting a „religious word‟ to be imparted
nevertheless.

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The irony of modern man, according to Schaeffer, is that this autonomous intellectual enterprise initiated through man’s self-confidence in his power to independently reason his way to the answers, has ended, not in the triumph of rationality, but in its actual abandonment. By clinging to his autonomy, man has lost his rationality. His reason has been engulfed by his rationalism. Man remains at the center of the universe, still clinging to a hope, but without any rational basis.

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Schaeffer‟s solution is simple: Christianity has the answer to the verything modern man has despaired of ever finding: a unified answer forthe whole of life. True, it demands that we abandon our rationalistic
autonomy and return to the reformation view of the Holy Scriptures, but
in so doing we get back our rationality, our meaningfulness, and
ourselves. Authentic Christianity is no existential leap into an irrational
upper sphere; Schaeffer insists that the Bible speaks truth “both about
God Himself and about the area where the Bible touches history and the

cosmos.” Man can have his answers to life “on the basis of what is open
to verification and discussion”. And a unified answer to life is, Schaeffer
asserts, what man really wants. “He did not accept the line of despair
and the dichotomy because he wanted to. He accepted it because, on
the basis of the natural development of his rationalistic presuppositions,
he had to. He may talk bravely at times, but in the end it is despair.” Intruth, “Modern man longs for a different answer than the answer of hisdamnation”. Christianity, with its reasonable and consistent frameworkfor understanding the world we live in, can put an end to this despair byputting man right with God.

E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]

E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]

E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]

E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]

E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]

Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]

Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]